Ignatius reached into the deep pocket of her leather jacket, which hung from the back of the chair almost all the way to the floor. She pulled out an unmarked bottle filled with clear liquid.
“I’m more than glad to join you for a drink,” said Ignatius, “I can’t speak for the Chief Designer.”
“I know your face, but I don’t recall your name,” said Nedelin.
“You’ve never known it, Marshal. I’m an agent of Glavlit.”
“Oh? Then I guess I never will. Is there at least a name I can call you?”
“Ignatius.”
“A saint! As much as a Jesuit can be a saint.”
“Or a saint a soldier.” She half-stood from her seat and stretched her arm across the table, offering a glass of vodka to Nedelin. “Who else?” she asked.
The General Designer did not respond, nor did any of his aides. The Chief Designer tapped two fingers on the table. She filled his glass to brimming.
The young man with glasses raised his hand. Ignatius grabbed the nearest glass, from in front of another of the aides, and filled it halfway. She passed it to the left, and it was handed from aide to aide to the General Designer to Nedelin before it reached its destination.
“Only the four of us?” asked Ignatius. “That’s all right. I only brought one bottle.”
She raised her glass. “To the engineers gathered here, and to all who give themselves to this great Soviet… no, this great human project. To our engineers.”
She, Nedelin, the Chief Designer, and the young aide raised their glasses, and the rest of those seated at the table scrambled to find an empty glass to raise as well. The staggered response came: “To our engineers.”
The Chief Designer had always enjoyed the sound of glasses being set back on a table after a toast. It reminded him of a gunshot before a race, a signal that things could finally begin. He held his glass high and set it down last.
“So, Ignatius,” said Nedelin, “why the name of a saint?”
“I prefer to think of him as an educator. Anyway”—she pointed up—“one would need to believe in a god to believe in saints.”
“A good state atheist, then?”
“Does that mean you aren’t?”
“I don’t believe in the old god, comrade, but not because the party told me so. I saw the holy die just as easily as the damned on the battlefield. Easier even. It’s more difficult to give up if one doesn’t believe in a second chance. It’s the same human greed that keeps us alive as makes us believe we can live forever.”
“And now we fly our cosmonauts to the front door of heaven, knock, and find it vacant.”
“Is that why we fly?”
“The birds have never offered up a reason, why must we?”
The curtain hung in front of the doorway to the kitchen parted, and a line of servers emerged carrying plates full of food. The men were locals, Turkic. When Baikonur had been founded, the Chief Designer had been forbidden from hiring locals for any sensitive position, though what qualified as sensitive had never been defined. The specter of Stalin still loomed, when all the designers had to hide their Jewish engineers from his gaze, when Asian members of their staffs seemed to disappear weekly. And for all his genius, what of Tsiolkovski…
The General Designer cleared his throat. “We fly to conquer. There’s a realm we have not yet claimed, and we, as a species, must claim it. First, we conquered the idea of a god, and now we lay claim to where we imagined his home to be.”
“And I thought I was the military man at the table,” said Nedelin.
“We do what it takes to survive,” said the Chief Designer. “It isn’t about conquering, it’s about enduring.”
“Do you mean the species or yourself?” said the General Designer.
“The same could be asked of you.”
“We got rid of god,” said Nedelin, “and yet these two men try to claim his title.”
The General Designer grunted and looked down at the table.
“They used to say the same about Tsiolkovski,” said the Chief Designer.
A reverent hush overtook the table at the mention of Tsiolkovski’s name. The servers arranged the plates, reaching through the narrow gaps between those seated, managing not to bump shoulders or brush sleeves. The Chief Designer admired their coordination, the machinery of it. Never once did two plates clink against one another. The server nearest him set down a dish with pickles and another with sliced pumpernickel and pork fat. Three large bowls, arranged evenly around the table, contained cold cucumber salad, the other ingredients completely drowned in thick white smetanka. Then came the individual bowls of cold borscht. No one even had time to raise a spoon for the soup before another wave of servers arrived with the main course, some sort of poached river fish crisscrossed on top with whole sprigs of dill.
Nedelin raised his glass. “To Tsiolkovski. Maybe a man, maybe a saint, maybe a god, maybe all three. To Tsiolkovski.”
Everyone around the table lifted glasses, full or not. “To Tsiolkovski.”
After the toast, the General Designer waved off a server with a pitcher of water and extended his arm across the table, empty glass held in the tips of his knobby fingers.
He said, “Ignatius, was it? A drink if you would, and for any of my associates who would like one, as well. If you have enough.”
“Of course.” Ignatius reached into the other pocket of her coat and pulled out a second bottle of vodka. “I made sure to bring enough for everyone.”
THE CHIEF DESIGNER, Ignatius, and Nedelin opted to walk the two kilometers from the dining room back to the dormitories. Night had set in, moonless and starry. The dirt road showed ahead of them only as a patch of black slightly smoother than the black all around it. In the distance, the lights of the dormitories clustered above the horizon like flaming engines.
Ignatius took a swig from what remained in the bottle. Everyone at the table had ended up taking some, but none of the General Designer’s aides took much. Ignatius passed the bottle to Nedelin, who tipped it back, gulping down half the remaining vodka. He passed the bottle to the Chief Designer, who willingly finished it off.
“What to do with the bottle,” he said.
“Aren’t you in the business of launching things?” said Nedelin. “Send it on its way.”
The Chief Designer clutched the bottle by its neck and hurled it into the darkness. It thudded in the dirt and then bounced into something hard. He imagined the shattering was the sound of the stars overhead.
The alcohol flowed as excess heat in his blood. His limbs felt weightless. He thought hard about each step as he took it.
“What actually brings you here?” asked Nedelin.
Ignatius had lagged behind, still within earshot but not offering much in the way of conversation. She gave no indication that she was listening but the Chief Designer knew she was.
“I was hoping to collaborate, for once,” he said.
“You must be truly desperate,” said Nedelin.
“I’m just wiser. Five years ago, the General Designer had nothing to offer, but now he does.”
“So you’ll exploit him.”
“He’s a resource like any other.”
“And you?”
Ignatius stepped between them. “The Chief Designer is a resource, too, but unlike all the others.”
Nedelin chuckled.
“Look at the stars,” he said. “Whenever I go back to Moscow it’s like the whole sky disappears.”
The Chief Designer craned his neck, almost stumbling backward. The largest stars shone bright as spotlights, and the fainter stars, so many of them, hazed the firmament. If his vision were not blurred by drink, could he pick out Mars? Like the stars but untwinkling, tinged dusty red.